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MATTHEW WILLIAM KING Materializing the Oing-Géluk Formation at Yeke-yin Küriy-e In the remainder of this short article I explore a wildly metaphoric and poetic praise to the geography surrounding the college of Tashi Tsépel Ling, a prominent scholastic college in Yeke-yin Kiiriye, that illustrates the central role of material culture in Buddhist histories of Khalkha. In Agwangkhaidub’s rendition, the mountains, forests, and even inhabitants of the landscape become not just a symbol for, but also a material instantiation of, a body mandala. Of particular interest — at least in light of my own research into the mediation of Qing sovereignty in Mongolian and Tibetan Buddhist literature — is the way this short, esoteric praise is twinned so tightly with the Qing formation via the “unification of religion and politics” rubric already so familiar to historians of Buddhist life in Inner Asia during the Qing.’ The work examined below, entitled simply A Praise to the Sacred Site of Drepung Trashi Tsépel Ling (Tib. ‘bras spungs bkra shis tshe ‘phel gling gi gnas bstod), 1s just one such text from his extant collected works. Other examples include, but are not limited to, catalogues (Tib. dkar chag), praises (Tib. bstod pa), and “measures of circumambulatory routes” (Tib. /am skor) in and through his still settling urban environment. In addition to the great interest this monk’s oeuvre holds for historians of visual and material culture, here historians after the lived and performative side of Inner Asian religions — not just catalogues of canonical texts or histories of doctrinal development — will find unusual riches. This is no doubt explained by Agwangkhaidub’s prominent position during what was meant to be the final settlement of the previously roaming monastic city of Yeke-yin Ktiriy-e under the great Fifth Jebtsundamba Khutugtu."* As just one example, Agwangkhaidub composed an entire cluster of texts that carefully described the form and contents of Yeke Ktirey-e’s famous, large-scale copper statue of Maitreya Buddha (which was consecrated in 1833 by the disciple of Agwangkhaidub, the Fifth Jebtsundamba). Our author dully recorded a careful description of these momentous events for posterity. In addition, he wrote several tracts on the history, visuality, and worship of Maitreya connected to both the statue and at least one large-scale thangka painting of the deity completed 1821. Agwangkhaidub’s Maitreya corpus also offers fascinating, and I think historically invaluable, directions for what Michel de Certeau would call “users” of the newly settled Yeke-yin Ktiriy-e, guiding For example: Schwieger, Peter: The Dalai Lama and the Emperor of China: A Political History of the Tibetan Institution of Reincarnation. Columbia University Press, New York 2015; Ishihama Yumiko: The Notion of ‘Buddhist Government’ (chos srid) Shared by Tibet, Mongol, and Manchu in the Early 17" Century. In: The relationship between religion and state (chos srid zung ‘brel) in traditional Tibet: proceedings of a seminar held in Lumbini, Nepal, March 2000. Ed. Ciippers, Christoph. Lumbini International Research Institute, Lumbini 2004, pp. 15-31; Elverskog, Johan: Mongol Time Enters a Qing World; Elverskog, Johan: Our Great Qing. Lubsangchiiltimjigmiddambiijaltsan, Tib. blo bzang tshul khrims ‘Jigs med bstan pa’i rgyal mtshan. Despite the centrality of the great Fifth Jebtsundamba in later Mongol Buddhist historiography, he only lived for thirty five years, from 1815 to 1840. 140
